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With the explosion of e-publishing and the need for writers to help promote their own work, all writers – first-timers and best-selling pros face the ongoing dilemma of promoting their work without being shrill about it. But much self-promotion on social media seems less about utility and effective advertising and more about ego sustenance. How do you avoid this pitfall?

In April, Rebecca Makkai, a fiction writer, published a satirical piece on the blog for the literary magazine Ploughshares titled “Writers You Want to Punch in the Face(book).” In it, she depicted the Facebook posts of a fictional writer, Todd Manly-Krauss, who is “the world’s most irritating writer.” Teddy Wayne offers some useful tips for all of us in his “Of Myself I Sing” NYT piece.

Read more here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/fashion/of-myself-i-sing.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A5%22%7D&_r=0

Who hasn’t heard – or doesn’t suffer from the lament “No time to hit the gym?” No worries: Recent studies have found that when it comes to exercise, intensity matters more than duration. Even if you have just 15 minutes to spare, you can still squeeze in an effective workout pretty much anywhere that’s convenient—the office, the airport or your kitchen.

This Wall Street Journal article walks you through the process of finding the right time and the right place to get your exercise in:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/fitness-apps-for-exercising-in-15-minutes-or-less-1409353121?KEYWORDS=workouts+for+the+overworked

CNA Strategic Studies press just released Reviving the Caliphate: Fad, or the Future? < http://www.cna.org/research/2014/reviving-caliphate by Julia McQuaid.

This paper examines the concept of restoring the caliphate in modern times, a notion that some extremist groups have supported in recent years. It focuses on the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’s declaration of a caliphate in Iraq and Syria in June 2014 and discusses the potential ramifications of this action on the region, the global jihadi movement, and U.S. interests in the broader Muslim world.

When we created the high Concept for Out of the Ashes several years ago we knew we wanted the focus of the story to be in the Middle East – the Greater Levant. This CNA study confirms the churn we anticipated would persist as the book hit the streets in May of this year.

The Internet as we know it has only been around for a generation.  Pretty much everyone in the industrialized world takes the Web for granted by now, as it has become a ubiquitous component of business, government, and our social lives.  Yet, most of us probably don’t give much thought to the 77 undersea fiber optic cables spanning nearly a million kilometers that carry 99% of the world’s communications and data. Fortunately, one website has done the service of providing not only an amazing visualization of this vital, yet vulnerable infrastructure, but tied its importance to naval history and military operations.  Even the Air Force’s UAV operations rely on undersea cables to reduce the latency inherent in satellite networks. Built Visible’s Messages in the Deep page serves as a reminder that our daily lives remain inextricably linked to the oceans. (for even more details, see Submarine Cable Map). This overlooked aspect of sea power facilitates global commerce today much as surface shipping has done for centuries.

You can learn a lot from watching awards ceremonies. For my money, Matthew McConaughey’s acceptance speech at the Oscar’s is for the ages. Why, here’s what we all can learn.

You should absolutely be proud of your achievements. However, unless you’re content with that being the capstone of your life, there’s a time to celebrate and a time to get busy again.

Here are three ways to get past “I Made It” mode when you succeed:

1. Don’t say those three words. Instead, be grateful. Understand that you, more than likely, did not succeed on your own. I know I didn’t. There were many people that were divinely positioned in my life during my toughest moments to help me get back on my feet and make small steps to turn my life around. Celebrate with the people who helped you along the way and share your genuine appreciation for their time, support and sacrifices.
2. Understand you have a target on your back now. Don’t get big-headed. Once the news is out about your great achievement, you are no longer “underground”. People know about you and what you’re doing, even though you don’t know them. Don’t let all the new (and extra) attention get to your head, for it may one day catch you offguard and cause you to lose what you worked so hard for. If you don’t believe me, ask the Miami Heat after winning the championship last year. Who won the NBA championship THIS year?
3. Humble yourself to know you have MORE work to do. Begin again. Oftentimes, once we set a goal, we become focused on reaching it. After achieving that big promotion, set yourself another challenging goal to keep you grounded and driven to do even better than before. If you need a best practice, follow Matthew McConaughey’s example during his 2014 Oscars acceptance speech:

An excerpt:

And to my hero, that’s who I chase. Now, when I was 15 years old, I had a very important person in my life come to me and say, “Who’s your hero?” And I said, “I don’t know, I’ve got to think about that. Give me a couple of weeks.” I come back two weeks later; this person comes up and says, “Who’s your hero?” I said, “I thought about it. It’s me in 10 years.” So I turned 25. Ten years later, that same person comes to me and says, “So, are you a hero?” And I was like, “Not even close! No, no no!” She said, “Why?” I said, “Because my hero’s me at 35.”

So you see every day, every week, every month, and every year of my life, my hero’s always ten years away. I’m never going to be my hero. I’m not going to attain that. I know I’m not. And that’s just fine with me, because that keeps me with somebody to keep on chasing. — Matthew McConaughey

The great growth of fortunes in recent decades is not a sinister development. Instead it is simply the inevitable result of an extraordinary technological innovation, the microprocessor, which Intel INTC in Your Value Your Change Short position brought to market in 1971. Seven of the 10 largest fortunes in America today were built on this technology, as have been countless smaller ones. These new fortunes unavoidably result in wealth being more concentrated at the top.

But no one is poorer because Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, et al., are so much richer. These new fortunes came into existence only because the public wanted the products and services—and lower prices—that the microprocessor made possible. Anyone who has found his way home thanks to a GPS device or has contacted a child thanks to a cellphone appreciates the awesome power of the microprocessor. All of our lives have been enhanced and enriched by the technology.

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A bit over fifty years ago, in the spring of 1964, in the basement of College Hall at Dartmouth College, the world of computing changed forever. Professor John Kemeny, then the chairman of the mathematics department at Dartmouth and later its president, and Mike Busch, a Dartmouth sophomore, typed “RUN” on a pair of computer terminals to execute two programs on a single industrial-sized General Electric “mainframe” computer. The programs were written in Basic (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), a fledgling computer language designed for the everyman, by Prof. Kemeny, Professor Tom Kurtz and a team of eager students.

Back then, using a computer was almost exclusively the privilege of a select minority of scientists and engineers who were conversant in the early languages of assembly code and Fortran. Prof. Kemeny, who had been a programmer on the Manhattan Project for Richard Feynman and an assistant to Albert Einstein, and Prof. Kurtz, a former student of the computing pioneer John Tukey, saw great potential in computers for advancing teaching and research, but they realized that this would require a whole new level of accessibility.

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Many think terrorism is on the run. It is not. The number of al Qaeda and other jihadist groups and fighters are growing, not shrinking. U.S. disengagement—or even risking the return of terrorists to the field by freeing them from detention—is not the answer to the threat they pose. Instead, U.S. strategy should be revamped, prioritizing American interests and developing a more effective, light-footprint campaign.

According to new data in a RAND report, from 2010 to 2013 the number of jihadist groups world-wide has grown by 58%, to 49 from 31; the number of jihadist fighters has doubled to a high estimate of 100,000; and the number of attacks by al Qaeda affiliates has increased to roughly 1,000 from 392. The most significant terrorism threat to the United States comes from groups operating in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Moner Mohammad Abusalha, an American who was a member of the al Qaeda affiliate organization al-Nusra, blew himself up in Syria on March 29.

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When we came up with the high concept for Out of the Ashes we did our due diligence and read all we could about the region. A few books stood out as invaluable to our work. One of the key ones was Tom Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem. Here is some of the praise this book has garnered and why it guided our writing:

“If you’re only going to read one book on the Middle East, this is it.”—Seymour M. Hersh

One of the most thought-provoking books ever written about the Middle East, From Beirut to Jerusalem remains vital to our understanding of this complex and volatile region of the world. Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman drew upon his ten years of experience reporting from Lebanon and Israel to write this now-classic work of journalism. In a new afterword, he updates his journey with a fresh discussion of the Arab Awakenings and how they are transforming the area, and a new look at relations between Israelis and Palestinians, and Israelis and Israelis. Rich with anecdote, history, analysis, and autobiography, From Beirut to Jerusalem will continue to shape how we see the Middle East for many years to come.

Writers looking for help? Evan Williams to the Rescue!

Evan Williams is at it again. Mr. Williams is sitting in an office here a mile up the road from Twitter, where he is a founder and is still a board member, working on Medium, an amorphous-sounding company that could be one more curio of the Internet age or might end up taking over the world.

So in 2012, he started Medium, a place where stories are made and read. It’s a blogging platform, and anyone can contribute, with writing on all manner of topics. The posts that gain attention, often on Twitter, are displayed prominently and gain more traction as readers and contributors weigh in. The design is responsive, meaning that no matter what you are reading on — phone, tablet or computer — it always looks pretty.

Read more here